The Zombie's Voodoo Ancestry

White Zombie (1932)

Even those who prefer to begin in medias res, as I do, must eventually come back to the beginning. And as far as zombie movies go, you can’t get any earlier than 1932’s White Zombie. There had been a stage play featuring the walking dead, and a short story about them, but White Zombie was the first to capture zombies on celluloid. The launch of zombies into the American popular consciousness, like that of most monsters, reflected the events of the time. And at the time, Haiti, home of voodoo and zombies, was under military occupation by the United States of America.

Haiti loomed large in the American public’s imaginations partly because it was the first free, black-run nation in the Western Hemisphere. Haitians were slaves who rose up and slaughtered their French masters, the most frightening thing imaginable to racist Americans of the 19th century. For this and many other reasons, when another revolution, this one to overthrow the dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, threatened American business interests in the Caribbean, President Woodrow Wilson sent Marines to Port-Au-Prince in 1915. They weren’t supposed to stay long but for nineteen years, Americans had troops on the island battling rebels while attempting to reorganize the Haitian government in the American model. It was for the good of the Haitian people, Americans rationalized, who needed saving from themselves (sound familiar?). Almost universally ignored in U.S. history books, the memory of 20th century U.S. imperial experiments persists in Latin America and Asia. These little-discussed conquests shaped the American foreign policy which led to the “Global War on Terror,” and kick started the U.S.-centric cultural exchanges some call “soft imperialism;” the similarities between colonial occupations of the early 20th century and the current occupation of Iraq are very instructive.

Thus zombies staggered under the Caribbean Sea to America (as proven in Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, zombies can travel underwater). But they were a different type of creature than Fulci’s intestine lovers; mainly, they did not have an unquenchable thirst for brains. 1930s films feature voodoo-style zombies, who were raised from the dead to be slaves. They worked in the fields ceaselessly and could not wish for more, a terrifying idea to people whose collective unconscious was still haunted by slavery. If they did attack people, it was at the command of a voodoo master like Bela Lugosi, who plays the villain in this film with a lot of creepy Eastern European charisma. Not only does Lugosi have the power to control the zombies with his mind, he has a name totally worthy of stealing (or appropriating): Murder Legendre. Everyone else with speaking roles does a mediocre job at best, but the silent zombies are great. With only vacant, opaque eyes as makeup, they are somehow very visceral and evocative. You can practically smell them.

Since White Zombie is from the early talkie era, when filmmakers were still confounded by sound, and star actress Madge Bellamy was most famous as a silent actress, the visual elements of the film are the best. Credit must be given to Arthur Martinelli, the cinematographer, and Victor Halperin, the director, for their inventive visuals, but I have to call bullshit on their Gothic style. Less than twenty years of American industry was able to dot the coastline of Haiti with immense fortresses right out of Bram Stoker? Authenticity aside, Martinelli makes good use of deep shadows, cutting sharp diagonal lines across the screens which make the black and white photography quite stark. Images like Bellamy’s zombified character Madeline, a passive look in her eyes, floating down a dark hallway with white robes fluttering behind her like butterflies, is quite beautiful and Victorian.

White Zombie’s Victorian aspects might be its failure, though, because its acting is very old fashioned (read: stiff, theatrical, and boring). It’s theatrical, so it’s designed for people far away from their audience, and the actors had not adjusted to the intimacy of the camera at this point in film history. For example, while a long shot of the zombie Madeline may be ghostly, close-ups of her are irritating because her eyes roll around and gesticulate far more than is necessary for the reanimated. I appreciated the effort, but nowadays this style just comes off as stiff over-acting.

Another decidedly old-fashioned aspect of White Zombie is its racial politics, spreading the message of white supremacy by scaring the bejeesus out of white people (an idea that, come to think of it, is making a comeback). The Haitian “natives” are the source of voodoo, the rebel slaves with mysterious mastery over death, who in a twist of logic need saving from themselves precisely because of their own threatening difference. The white main characters are depicted as more “human” than the black “natives”; though some black actors do have speaking parts in this film, they are disappointing racial stereotypes. This draws a sharp line between our four aristocratic (i.e. white) heroes and the common (i.e. black) folk, who, again, are seen as victims of their own ignorance and inferiority. They form a sinister backdrop for the action, a dangerous setting, functioning rather like Iraqi civilians in TV segments about American soldiers. Beyond this capacity the Haitians are unworthy of further scrutiny in White Zombie. The villain to be reckoned with is Lugosi, the white sorcerer whose evil powers threaten other white people, even white women…white women in trouble? Call the goddamned army!! And thus the story is spun, and voodoo is snatched away from its black origins. It’s an inherently flawed idea, though, because without the black sorcerers’ knowledge, Murder Legendre would never have been a sorcerer himself. He depends on them for existence even as he tries to posit himself as better than them, a classic slave master, and Haitians have a well-proven ability to shuck off an unfair master.

If you do decide to follow your anthropological or obsessively completist impulses and see White Zombie- the only reasons to see White Zombie, by the way- it’s easy to find. It was abandoned from the end of its theatrical run until the 1960s, and has been in the public domain for some time. So it’s easy to watch White Zombie for free on www.archive.org, but difficult to get a decent copy. I rented a DVD copy (of which there are plenty to choose from), but there was a lot of background hiss and overall very poor sound, and the internet versions are sure to be worse. So I cannot heartily recommend White Zombie, but as a reflection of its times it is very telling.